Sur le progres des sciences

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-101
Author(s):  
Oana Matei ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Prussian Academy ◽  
Berlin Academy ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

This paper investigates the Baconian roots of Maupertuis’s Lettre XIX. Sur le Progrès des Sciences (1752). The Letter was published almost a decade after Maupertuis had accepted Frederick II’s invitation to move from Paris to Berlin and become the new President of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Contrary to the secondary literature that identifies a distinction between Maupertuis’s Parisian and Berliner phases, this paper argues that there is in fact greater continuity between the two. Based on a reading that empha­sizes the programmatic and methodological commonalities between Bacon’s project in De augmentis scientiarum (1623) and Maupertuis’s Lettre XIX, this paper argues that, in a Baconian fashion, Maupertuis combines the roles of the “scientist” and the “natural philosopher” into an integrated plan of action with both intellectual an institutional aims. One of Maupertuis’s aims was to highlight the importance of observation and experiment not only in the development of natural philosophy but also for some aspects of speculative philosophy, while another of his aims was to reinvigorate the structure of the Berlin Academy and to model it the fashion of other similar European intellectual projects of that time.

scholarly journals Endowed Molecules and Emergent Organization: The Maupertuis-Diderot Debate

2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 38-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles T. Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Information ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Modes Of Transmission ◽  
Strong Interest ◽  
Berlin Academy ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

In his Systeme de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organises (originally published in Latin in 1751 as Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturae systemate, under the pseudonym Dr Baumann), Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and a natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of ‘genetic’ information, described living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence.” Now, Maupertuis was a Leibnizian of sorts; his molecules possessed higher-level, ‘mental’ properties, recalling La Mettrie’s statement in L’Homme-Machine, that Leibnizians have “rather spiritualized matter than materialized the soul.” But Maupertuis also debated this issue with Diderot, who critiqued this theory in the additions to his 1753 Pensees sur l’interpretation de la nature. Where Maupertuis attributes higher-level properties to his living minima, Diderot argues that these can only be ‘organizational’, i.e., properties of the whole. At issue here is the degree of commitment to a form of materialism.

Francis Bacon and the Origins of Christian Virtuosity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Nuovo
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
The Mind

Although the vocation of Christian virtuoso was invented and named by Robert Boyle, Francis Bacon provided the archtype. A Christian virtuoso is an experimental natural philosopher who professes Christianity, who endeavors to unite empiricism and supernatural belief in an intellectual life. In his program for the renewal of the learning Bacon prescribed that the empirical study of nature be the basis of all the sciences, including not only the study of physical things, but of human society, and literature. He insisted that natural causes only be used to explain natural events and proposed not to mix theology with natural philosophy. This became a rule of the Royal Society of London, of which Boyle was a principal founder. Bacon’s rule also had a theological use, to preserve the purity and the divine authority of revelation. In the mind of the Christian virtuoso, nature and divine revelation were separate but complementary sources of truth.

Orpheus in Berlin: A Reappraisal of Johann Georg Sulzer's Theory of the Polite Arts

1995 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan van der Zande
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Modern State ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Prussian Academy ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Belles Lettres ◽  
Civic Awareness ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

In 1771 Johann Georg Sulzer, a well-established member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres, published the first volume of his long awaited lexicon A General Theory of the Polite Arts (Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste). Although the work sold well, not many critics were convinced of its major tenet that the production and enjoyment of works of art should serve to promote the civic awareness of the citizenry of the modern state. And while Sulzer's influence on the aesthetic theories of Kant and Schiller is generally recognized and he consequently has kept a relatively high profile in histories of aesthetics, his lexicon did not survive the century in which it was written.

Margaret Cavendish

Philosophy ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Boyle
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Religion And Theology ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Own Name

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (b. 1623–d. 1673), published at least six works of natural philosophy under her own name (the number depends on how one counts various second editions she published). Her prolific output also included poems, plays, essays, speeches, stories, science fiction, and letters to fictional correspondents. Despite Cavendish’s own desire for fame, her reputation has suffered at the hands of readers and biographers who dismissed her philosophical writings without giving them any serious consideration. However, interest in Cavendish’s philosophical theories has increased exponentially since the 1980s. Much of the secondary literature published in the 1980s and 1990s aimed to dispel the idea that Cavendish is not worthy of study and to establish both that Cavendish’s writings were informed by her careful readings of the work of her contemporaries, and that Cavendish’s own philosophical thinking consisted of a detailed, internally consistent alternative to the mechanistic natural philosophy embraced by many of those contemporaries. Now, fortunately, scholars do not feel the need to justify their study of Cavendish. Secondary literature published since the early 2000s on Cavendish’s philosophical work starts from the assumptions that studying Cavendish’s works enriches our understanding of the landscape of 17th-century philosophy and that the details of Cavendish’s views are inherently worth analyzing. The secondary literature on Cavendish is now extensive and comes from many disciplines—English literature, philosophy, history, history of science, political science, and cultural studies, among others—and, accordingly, draws on a variety of methodological approaches. For this bibliography, secondary literature has been chosen which is based on close textual analysis and sensitivity to the historical and philosophical contexts in which Cavendish was writing. Works are divided into the following sections: Primary Sources, Modern Editions, Biographies, Overviews, Online Resources, Anthologies, Natural Philosophy, Epistemology, Political Philosophy, Religion and Theology, and Rhetorical Style.

FREDERICK THE GREAT AND JEAN LE ROND D'ALEMBERT ON PHILOSOPHY, TRUTH, AND POLITICS

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHIRU LIM
Keyword(s):  
Political Life ◽  
Political Reforms ◽  
Berlin Academy ◽  
Radical Enlightenment ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Jean Le Rond D'alembert

AbstractThe prize question of the Berlin Academy of Sciences for 1780, on the utility of deception, has attracted both controversy and scholarly interest. Yet very little attention has been dedicated to the question's peculiar beginnings in the correspondence between the philosopher and mathematician Jean Le Rond d'Alembert and Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, in a discussion concerning the expulsion of the Jesuits from France. This correspondence not only reveals the prize question's complex genealogy in long-standing debates on the true ends of philosophy, but also helps revise conventional frameworks for understanding the relationship between philosophy and politics in Enlightenment Europe. Far from an adornment intended to boost the ‘Enlightened’ credentials of an absolutist king, d'Alembert held the momentum in this relationship, and recruited Frederick to his own campaign of promoting publicly useful philosophy. ‘Philosophy’ here amounted to a commitment to the truth and its public defence, rather than subscription to or belief in a specific set of ideas or political reforms. Placing pressure on rulers to disavow deceitful politics, the far-reaching implications of this conception of philosophy for political life were no less ambitious than the agendas espoused by protagonists of a supposed ‘radical Enlightenment’.

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